Object Talk | Intimate Line(ages): Queer Reproductions and Gender Ambiguity in Girodet’s Anacréon
Object-based lecture presented by Dr. C.C. McKee (they/she), Assistant Professor of History of Art, 91³Ô¹ÏÍø and Dr. Erin Lam (they/them), Asst. Prof. of Classics and Comparative Literature, UC Riverside Throughout his life, Anne-Louis Girodet—the French Neoclassical painter and student of Jacques-Louis David—translated classical poetry and produced studies from its themes. After his death in 1824, Girodet’s compatriots and former students published his translations of and drawings after Classical literary sources including the Greek lyric poet Anacreon, whose erotic subject matter represents a range of hetero- and homosexual relationalities.
Girodet’s representation of this poet’s work often breaks with contemporary aesthetic conventions for representing gender, thereby producing Anacreon as an amalgamation of virile and ephebic masculinity. McKee and Lam highlight the queer eroticism and gender ambiguity of Girodet’s understudied Anacréon, a departure from previous studies on Girodet that have circularly interpreted his oeuvre as gay or queer based on his biographical details, while simultaneously evacuating his work of queer meaning in favor of de-eroticized political symbolism.
This paper thus offers a twofold intervention: first, McKee and Lam propose a queer art historical methodology centered around queer intimacy that holds both the political and the identitarian in tension, allowing for a de-idealized biographical analysis that informs but does not displace our interpretation of Girodet’s work. These homosocial lineages are also formal aesthetic elements that suffuse the lines of the lithographs produced by Girodet’s former students after his original drawings. Second, they argue that Girodet’s classical drawings and translations, exemplified by his Anacréon, depict a feminized androgyny that does not straightforwardly celebrate any particular gender, performance of gender, or sexuality, but instead gender ambiguity and fluidity.
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